sales Archives | Lateshipment.com

16 ways to improve Average Order Value during the holidays

Raksna Anand — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 07:38:38 +0000

Is average order value important? Of course, it’s a key metric that e-commerce brands should focus on during this holiday season. Increasing the average order value directly boosts your store’s revenue, increases customer loyalty, and retention and reduces churn rate.

How Does Average Order Value Influence Customer retention?

If a customer spends a lot on your website, it means that the customer trusts you, believes in your brand, and enjoys the experience that they’ve been receiving from the brand. When they’re satisfied with the post-purchase journey, and if they’re satisfied with the product that they have received, this will play a huge role in retention. Higher the average order value, better the customer experience and post-purchase journey, more would be the customer retention rate.

16 ways to improve Average Order value during the holidays

1. Offer product bundles

Product bundling is a well-known strategy used during the holiday season. Often complementary products are bundled together. Bundle the products that are often bought by your customers and present the bundle in a discounted price to increase the average order value of your cart. A popular type of bundling during the holiday season is the gift set.

2. Add gifting options

Customers are shopping at your site often looking to buy gifts for their loved ones. Save them some time by offering gifting options. This gifting option can be a great way to save time for your customers, adding to a positive customer experience. You also get to brand all your products with your gift-wrapping techniques.

3. Try to upsell your products

Upselling is usually recommending a higher priced or a better version of the product that the customer is currently viewing. This can be achieved by comparing a product with its high featured model and rating them. .

4. Add-on options

Offering complementary products that would go with the original product that the customer is viewing, can be a great way to present an opportunity to increase the average order value of the cart. For example, for a customer who is purchasing a moisturizer from a beauty brand, the same beauty brand can recommend face wash and serum before the application of the moisturizer to get a clearer skin. Clothing brands often do this by a ‘buy-the-look’ option while shopping.

5. Influence through Post - purchase journey

An average customer visits the order tracking page 6 to 8 times during delivery. This rate could be significantly increased during the holiday season owing to higher customer anxiety. Use the post-purchase communication channel to offer coupon codes, offers and discounts on products that are personally recommended for the customer. This has proven to be a very great marketing opportunity.

We’re seeing customers increase their revenue by an average of 12% through post-purchase promotions. (Fanx)

6. Suggestions in Checkout

The last touchpoint a customer can be influenced before the sale happens is the checkout page. The checkout page is when impulse decisions take place. E-commerce brands can suggest personalized recommendations or complementary products during checkout. Customers are more likely to add those products to their cart.

7. Try cross-selling

Cross-selling is the strategy through which an e-commerce brand recommends complementary products that go along with the product that the customer has chosen. This way, the customer feels very convenient and has a positive impression on the brand for recommending those products to them. Often customers might have forgotten to buy those complementary products and as a way of reminding that cross-selling acts as a way of reminding to the customers. Which also increasing the average order value.

8. Customise coupon codes

Customize and personalize the coupon codes according to an individual customer. Offer separate coupon codes for your loyalty members and first-time shoppers. Present thresholds for free shipping through customized coupon codes. For example, orders above $60 get free shipping with this ‘X’ coupon code. Present limited-time offers that last only for a few hours, to FOMO the customer into adding more items to the cart.

9. Incentivise customers as soon as they enter your shop

Offer discounts and collect emails from the customers as soon as they enter the shop. SpinTheWheel is one good tool which would help you do that. It offers a gamified experience and also offers coupon codes. Collecting emails from customers if you want the tool to do so.

10. Discounts with Loyalty programs

Loyal customers are a gold mine and don’t ever go cold on them. Always send frequent emails and SMSs to keep your loyal customers in the loop of what’s going on in your e-commerce space. A customer who has shopped from you before has a high probability of buying high valued items from you. Frequent communication with them about new product launches and offers that are going on in your store would be a great way to make them shop with you again.

11. Show how much they’ve saved through your offers

This might sound weird. Remind your customers that they have saved X amount of dollars by using coupon codes and offers from the brand. This would reduce cart abandonment rates. If the customer knows that they still have budget to purchase another item, they will do so knowing that they have saved so much.

12. Offer Tiered discounts

Offer a tired discount. For example: .20% offer on 2 products, 40% offer on 5 products, 50% offer on 10 products. Such a tiered discount would make the customer add more items into your cart, increasing the average order value.

13. Offer Buy Now, Pay Later Option

Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is a popular payment method that’s been used by millennials and Gen Zs over the past few months. Your customers are shopping for their loved ones, and amidst inflation, they’re still willing to spend a lot on gifts. Offering multiple payment methods, especially Buy Now Pay Later, would give them the privilege to shop for products right now and not worry about exceeding their budget. This could give them a great customer experience also.

14. Display Social proof

When the customer has doubts about buying a certain product from you, social proof can be a great way to nudge them further into buying your product. This sets the customer expectation right and reduces the number of returns.

15. Levarage Personalised product recommendations

Personalized product recommendations are a great way to increase the amount of time, customers spend on your website. This promotes user engagement and customer retention. Customers often tend to discover new products on your website if they do so. This would significantly increase the average order value.

16. Show Abundance scarcity

Have you seen many websites showing data on ‘X number of people have viewed this product in the last two hours’ or ‘only four or five stocks left’ for you to purchase? This is the use of fear of scarcity to lure customers into buying a product from the brand.

Final Word

There are many ways with which you can increase your average order value. But some techniques work only at some point. If the customer clearly has a budget, then any number of tricks wouldn’t encourage them to add more things to the cart. They’d be more focused on saving money during this expensive season of the year. Strategize your pricing, keeping both the luxury shoppers and budget savers in mind. Of course, ‘one size fits all’ doesn’t also apply to increasing the average order value of every customer’s cart.

The post 16 ways to improve Average Order Value during the holidays appeared first on Lateshipment.com.

7 Quick and Effective ways to increase holiday sales

Raksna Anand — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 16:22:58 +0000

Tis’ the season for cheer and joy not only for consumers but also for merchants due to the surge in holiday sales. Tis’ the season where e-commerce brands face a lot of competition and unprecedented challenges. Tis’ the same season when the business becomes very lucrative. Tis’ the reason why you want to concentrate on handling the holiday rush and increasing sales.

Here are 7 ways in which you can increase sales.

7 Quick and Effective ways to increase holiday sales

1. Get your website holiday ready

The holiday season is when people open their wallets and they are ready to make purchases. Normally, e-commerce brands would experience a surge in orders during the holiday season. It is essential that you keep your site ready for that spike in order volumes and traffic volumes. The streets are going to have festive cheers during the holiday season, the physical retail stores will be decorated, and even the USPS delivery office will be decorated with Christmas trees. Why not add festive cheers to your site to encourage customers to bring in joy?

Create a sense of urgency: You can add various limited-time offers and create floaters for those deals creating a sense of urgency.

Add customized holiday pop-ups: You can customize pop-ups or spin-the-wheel elements representing the holiday season and can offer special coupon codes to encourage purchases and increase holiday sales.

Test your site speed: As mentioned earlier, more traffic can be expected and it’s important that your website loads quickly in order to not lose your customers.

2. Improve SEO for holiday traffic

Optimize your product pages descriptions and copies and create holiday specific landing pages. Include more holiday specific keywords. Get found when people are searching.

It takes time for the SEO to actually drive results. If you haven’t started yet, it is high time that you start improving your ranking now and drive holiday sales.

Bonus tip: If you can offer express delivery to the customer;’s location, target them through local SEO. This would very much appeal to the last minute shoppers.

3. Optimize your website for mobile to increase holiday sales

Experts always recommend e-commerce websites to optimize for mobile, keeping it mobile first. This is stated while keeping several reasons in mind.

One, with the rise of social commerce, people tend to find stores through social platforms. Right from the discovery phase to the checkout phase, everything is taken care of on the social media platform itself. In this case, social media is mostly viewed through the mobile device and it’s better if your website gets optimized first on a mobile device.

With 6.4 billion users using a smartphone and the internet to discover various e-commerce brands, it would be a shame not to optimize for your mobile and convert most of the customers coming to your website.

Second, Google has created a mobile-first indexing policy, where the mobile version of the website is first crawled and ranked in Google. And Google being google, it’s vital that you optimize for mobile and get ranked in Google first. Here are some tips to improve mobile conversion rates

4. Display UGC

UGC is HIGHLY STILL RELEVANT. And it’s going nowhere. During the holiday season, people trust the opinions of others. Online reviews are as good as personal recommendations. Websites displaying UGC content have resulted in 29% high conversion rates. [websell.io]

Be transparent, display honest reviews and set the customer expectations right so that you don’t experience a lot of returns post holiday season.

5. Concentrate on Abandoned cart recovery

Statistics show that only 3 out of 10 people who add products to their cart actually checkout.

You can employ various techniques to re-market to these people, to those who have abandoned carts. You can send gentle reminders through email notifications, SMS and push notifications, urging them to finish their transaction. Sometimes a special coupon code can be sent to encourage those customers to convert them. Again, this creates a sense of urgency. You can enhance the urgency by saying

That only one product is left in the category that they were browsing
That ‘X’ many people have viewed this product recently

This would also create a sense of FOMO in them and encourage them to convert.

6. Offer multiple shipping options

It is always a good option to offer diversified shipping options to customers who are checking out. The customers get to choose when they want this product to be delivered. You can expect people to shop earlier during the holiday season and you can expect last-minute shoppers as well browsing through your website. You can’t take the risk of offering very limited shipping options that might potentially affect the bottom line of your store. By offering shipping optionality, your brand can cater to a diverse range of customer needs and preferences.

For example, when a last-minute shopper is looking for same-day delivery, shipping optionality would be the differentiator here. It might be easier for the customer to choose your website to buy their holiday gifts from. Multiple shipping options that people expect e-commerce brands to have are as follows:

Same day delivery
Free shipping
Expedited shipping
Overnight delivery
Overnight delivery,
Two-day delivery, and
International shipping.

A survey says that most people who opt for same-day delivery and two-day delivery often choose to pay more for shipping. This might be a relevant choice to consider. Amazon has set the bar very high for delivery and brands need to come up with a variety of options to meet customer expectations.

7. Turn your post-purchase customer journey into a holiday sales channel

The buy button is not the end of the customer journey, it’s rather the beginning of a relationship with a brand. It’s important for brands to acknowledge that the post-purchase customer journey plays a very big part in determining whether the customer returns back to the brand or not.

91% of customers say that they won’t return to a brand after a poor shipping experience and return experience.

The order tracking page is one of the most viewed pages. An average person visits the order tracking page 6-8 times after purchase. There are a number of ways with which you can turn your post-purchase customer journey into a sales funnel and increase your holiday sales.

Display personalized product recommendations: Leverage user data and provide personalized product recommendations to convert them again into a repeat user.
Cross-sell and Upsell:When people visit the order tracking pages, you can show them the related products or products that are of high value, which people might convert for and they might get to know that this particular product is available.

Display product reviews:Product reviews are a great social proof of showing that your brand and the products that you offer are very reliable. So it is always advisable to display relevant reviews of your products.

Bring in the holiday cheers to your tracking page: Why shouldn’t your order tracking page have a little holiday touch to it? People get in the holiday mood and the brand should also hop in with them to bring in the mood
Build trust and confidence through proactive communication: . The holiday season is known for its notorious shipping delays. Customers tend to get anxious and they might not shop with you again. By proactively communicating the status of their order, you can assure them that their package would reach them on time.

The post-purchase part of the custom journey is often overlooked. You can kill two birds with one stone by displaying a branded tracking page increasing brand recall and communicating the order status proactively, thus promoting holiday sales.

Final word

High Holiday Traffic Volume = High Holiday sales = Possible increase in the return rate.

As an e-commerce business, you should prepare for the holiday surge in sales and the post-holiday surge in returns. Don’t look at returns as a burden for your business, look at it as an additional opportunity to build a relationship with your customers. Turn your return process also into a sales funnel by giving a great customer experience.

The post 7 Quick and Effective ways to increase holiday sales appeared first on Lateshipment.com.